Driving into Valcourt, you can hardly miss the name Bombardier. The small Eastern Townships community, northwest of Sherbrooke, was the birthplace of Joseph-Armand Bombardier, the inventor and entrepreneur who laid the foundations of Bombardier Inc. With branches around the globe and more than 65,000 employees, the transportation company is a leader in rail technology and the third-largest manufacturer of civilian aircraft in the world.

Bombardier Inc. has clearly spread its wings beyond the Eastern Townships, but Valcourt is still the headquarters of Bombardier Recreational Products (BRP), owned in part by the Bombardier family. Various relatives also have businesses around what is essentially a company town.

Visitors can tour the BRP plant, but the reason we came to Valcourt was not to tour the factory, but rather to learn more about the machines assembled there, namely the Ski-Doo, Joseph-Armand Bombardier’s most famous invention. We headed toward the J. Armand Bombardier Museum, a stone’s throw from the plant and across the road from the Yvonne L Bombardier Cultural Centre. Named for Joseph-Armand’s wife, the centre showcases the work of Québécois artists.

I had five visitors from Norway in tow – three adults and two youngsters, Mia, 10, and Mats, 13. The Norwegians were familiar with snowmobiles because they use them in their own country, but they had no idea that they originated in Canada, let alone Quebec. For them, the museum, which documents the inventor’s life and times, was quite an eye opener.

Bombardier was born in 1907. He died of cancer at age 56, but, as we quickly found out, his achievements during his short life were considerable. In that time, he registered 24 patents in Canada, 16 in the United States and three in Britain.

Our first stop was Bombardier’s original garage, which is incorporated into the museum building. Moved from another part of town and reconstructed on site, it is a simple, wooden building housing the inventor’s office and a stockroom crammed with cogs, rubber tires and various odds and ends.

One of Bombardier’s most notable talents was being able to cannibalize machine parts and use them for something else. Along one wall of the garage were grinding wheels, brushing machines and pulleys with leather straps. The base of one of the gizmos came apparently from a milk separator used on the family farm. Young Mats was not impressed by these contraptions, but his mother, Line, and her partner, Sven-Ove, who work in a technical capacity for the marine division of Rolls-Royce, were greatly taken by Bombardier’s ingenuity.

Mats was much more interested in a stuffed moose head mounted on the wall. (He’d been bugging me to find him a moose since the day he arrived in Canada.) He wanted to pet it, but I pointed out the sign underneath that said that wasn’t allowed. He had a momentary sulk, but that vanished as soon as we walked into the main part of the museum, where dozens of gleaming snow machines were lined up, cheek by jowl.

The first section of the museum is devoted to Bombardier’s early attempts. He opened his garage when he was only 19 and historical descriptions give a context to his inventions. Sepia photographs, hands-on exhibits and videos projected on backdrops around the exhibits also set the scene, as well as reams of technical data (to me somewhat eye-glazing, but not to Line and Sven-Ove).

There is an educational section (that one proved to be the kids’ favourite) where visitors can participate in quizzes, keeping score with the help of a computer. Filling one wall was a world map, where Mia and Mats learned about the range of temperatures around the Northern Hemisphere by pressing on buttons that lit up each region, one by one. A nearby mural depicted the mode of transport in different countries during the winter – from yaks in the Himalayas, to reindeer in Lapland.

The exhibition halls were filled with a dazzling array of machines – from the sleek, black Mach Z Ski-Doo adorned with orange and yellow racing stripes, to the lumbering bright red Muskeg, a kind of modified tractor. Snow machines manufactured in other countries (Russia, Finland, the United States) were also on display.

Walking around the exhibits, we learned that Bombardier didn’t come by his success right away. He tinkered for more than a decade with a variety of vehicles, modifying them here and there until he had perfected his designs. His breakthrough came with the invention of the sprocket wheel/track system, which enabled heavy vehicles to move efficiently over difficult terrain, across both snow and swampy land. A scale model was on display and we all took turns with cranking the handle to see how it worked.

Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, Bombardier designed mostly industrial machinery, mainly for the military during the Second World War, but in the 1950s, he turned his attention to the consumer. The prototype of his first snowmobile, manufactured in 1959, is among the collection. Bearing little relation to the high-tech Ski-Doos we are familiar with today, it was a crude vehicle that ran on wooden skis with a looped track to drive it forward.

The final section of the museum is a temporary exhibit titled Bombardier Aujourd’hui/Bombardier Today, which, as its name suggests, showcases Bombardier Inc. A not-so-subtle plug for the achievements of the multinational corporation, it nonetheless gives a sense of how far the company has come since the days when young Joseph-Armand Bombardier spent all those hours tinkering in his garage.

IF YOU GO

To get to Valcourt, take Highway 10 East from Montreal to Exit 90 (direction Waterloo) and follow Route 220, which feeds onto Route 243 (direction Lawrenceville), then turn left onto Route 222. The museum is well signposted.

Opening hours are 10 a.m.-5 p.m., Tuesday to Sunday. Entry fees are $7 for adults, $5 for students and seniors and $15 for families. Children under 5 are free. bombardiermuseum.com.

The museum can be covered in a couple of hours, but next weekend, there will be lots of family activities. On Thursday, Feb. 16, you can combine a visit to the museum with a tour of the BRP plant. The minimum age to tour the plant, however, is 14 (an insurance requirement) and you need to book ahead because numbers are limited. Call 450-532-5300.

Grand Prix takes place Feb. 18-19 weekend

On Thursday, Feb. 16, visitors start arriving for Valcourt’s annual Ski-Doo Grand Prix. From 3:30-5:30 p.m. at the J. Armand Bombardier Museum, you can attend an autograph session with some of the hotshot racing drivers who will be pitting their wits against one another all weekend on the nearby racing oval.

On Friday, Feb. 17, from 3 p.m. onward, there will be warm-up events, including fireworks, drag racing and live entertainment. The Grand Prix proper kicks off Saturday, Feb. 18, at 8:30 a.m. with practice runs for the drivers, whose souped-up snowmobiles can reach speeds of up to 200 kph.

The racing competitions start Saturday; the finals take place on Sunday.

During the weekend, there will be several other activities and attractions: storytelling (in French only), an exhibition of antique snowmobiles, skating (outside the Yvonne Bombardier Cultural Centre) and rides on the vintage B12 snowmobile – a minibus on skis.

Throughout the weekend, there are also snocross races and snowboard competitions. The “Family Zone” offers a variety of activities for small fry.

A weekend pass to the Grand Prix costs $55 per person (free for children 12 years and under). Daily rates are $10 on Friday, $30 on Saturday and Sunday. For further details, visit grandprixvalcourt.com.

From Feb. 16 to Feb. 19, there is free admission to the exhibition halls at the Bombardier Museum.

Accommodation in Valcourt is limited to a handful of B&Bs, and they fill up months in advance of the Grand Prix. Sherbrooke, however, is only 20 minutes away and it has several downtown hotels including the Delta, Le President and the Grand Times. Call the tourist office 1-800-561-8331/819-821-1919 or check destinationsherbrooke.com.

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